Calling them “free-form ads,” Reddit said the new advertisements are its most native format ever, designed to look and feel like community content shared by real people.
The ads, meant to mimic the site’s megathreads, will enable advertisers to utilize a variety of formats in one post, including images, videos, and text.
According to numbers from Reddit, free-form ads got 28% more clicks than all other types of ads on the site and saw a jump in community engagement.
The next time you see an interesting post in your Reddit feed, take a closer look - because it might just be a paid advertisement.
I took ads out on Reddit years ago just to see if I could promote my music. It did less than zero and actively dragged me into a load of shit on various subs of interests I had. People there refused to talk to me, and told others not to.
Reddit is toxic. I avoid the site. Or better still maybe people should just spam it with irelevant shit
Reddit’s advertising platform has been garbage the entire time, I remember randomly going down the rabbit hole on social media marketing articles and the unanimous consensus among them was how bad/useless traditional advertising on Reddit was. One of the many reasons was due to how aggressively advertisement averse the userbase was (there were plenty of other critiques, such as how awful the management dashboard, metrics insight, etc. were). That being said, they did point out how fairly successful “organic” advertising could be on the site, e.g. AMAs, ads disguised as seemingly innocent meme posts, etc.
Don’t get me wrong, I loathe advertisements, too. I think reddit is/has been going the wrong direction in focusing so much on ads as their primary method of generating revenue. However, there is no excuse for harassing an independent artist just trying to get their work out there to get discovered. Sorry you went thru that mate.
I took the ads out because even though it isnt a career (music is a serious hobby, you might say) there was push back against putting your own music on the platform. “No self promotion” was a general rule iirc. A few subs kind of let it happen but they were rare.
The dashboard was indeed shit. It had all the wrong details and choices for someone like me.
I would have done an AMA but I’m just a bloke, LOL! And yes I agree - the users are anti-ad. Not sure how a site like that floats, financially. Can only imagine there is corp or Government money secretly going in (as we found out years after Google started up).